Letter from Larksong

by David Kline, Editor, reprinted with permission from Farming Magazine's Summer 2005 issue.

My friends keep passing on to me books and articles to read that tend toward the gloomy end of the economic spectrum. They know sports don't interest me and that I watch the world economic scene for entertainment. This morning's paper announced, on page four of the business section, that world oil prices jumped over two dollars a barrel to almost fifty-five dollars. Refiners are concerned about the availability of heating oil for next winter, the paper said. Yet the Dow went up almost a hundred points because the Dutch voted down the European Union's constitution and a Federal Reserve board executive said we're in the "eighth inning of interest rate hikes." Perhaps it is sports after all.

Peter Peterson, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, chairman of The Blackstone Group, and a moderate Republican, put it most succinctly in his book Running on Empty, "We are not paying our own way," he says. "As a nation, we are running on empty. If the ultimate test of a moral society is the heritage it leaves to its grandchildren, I would say we are failing that test."

Peterson quotes Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, as saying we face a 75 percent chance of a financial crisis within five years. Robert Rubin, former economic chief under President Clinton, likewise says we are confronting "a day of serious reckoning" and that "the traditional immunity of advanced countries like America to a Third World-style crisis isn't a birthright."

Peterson continues, "The new reality is our huge foreign currency account deficits. Currently we import $4.4 billion of foreign capital a day... Our borrowing is at unprecedented levels for an industrialized power. None of the specialists believe that this is sustainable, and half of the experts say we risk a hard landing. America must consume less and save more, export more and import less."

What these men-among our best and brightest-are telling us is that we are simply going broke. But as Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology said, "People cannot stand too much reality." It is business as usual.

What, you may ask, has this to do with farming? A lot. Sociologists agree that the first order of business for any nation is feeding the population. And that is why it is so hard to understand why China made the enormous strategic blunder of opting for two cars in every garage. Is it an attempt of a totalitarian government hanging on to power rather than providing real leadership? Not only will they now pave over their best arable lands, but the back side of the bell curve of world oil reserves will become a slick slope as consumption increases dramatically in China. Lester Brown will have to ask again, "Who will feed China?"

Back to farming-James Howard Kuntsler writes in his book, The Long Emergency, "Food production is going to be an enormous problem. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not "services" like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming."

I have been telling farmers that they should donate their development rights to a farmland trust because it is a win/win deal. As suburbia collapses in the coming fuel crunch, their farms will be much more valuable in dollars as food producers than as building sites for McMansions and starter castles.

It has been a good spring. The cool weather slowed the progress of the season so that it could he savored like a good meal. Peepers called for two months, the bird migration doodled along, the pastures were slow, the bees are well, and now the corn is ready to be cultivated, and there arc 2000 bales of nice hay waiting for this afternoon... DK